The AS is an advanced switching architecture. The primary difference between AS and a traditional switching mode is that AS uses the PCI-Express bus structure as the platform to implement a uniform switching of all kinds of traffic in the AS fabric after the processing of the traffic in different PIs, for example, the uniform processing of Ethernet traffic, ATM traffic, SDH/SONET traffic, IP traffic and etc. Thus, the AS is especially suitable for traffic processing in a Multiservice Transport Platform (MSTP).
In an existing SDH/SONET MSTP system, the processing of data traffic and processing of SDH/SONET traffic are conducted on different switching planes. By using the uniform packet switching technology, however, the AS is able to conduct a uniform switching of various kinds of traffic on one switching plane. Presently, the AS CORE has been released, which defines that the AS could connect with 128 types of PIs and each kind of traffic has a corresponding PI; and the PCI-Express refers to a serial difference bus structure, of which the rate is 2.5 Gbps at present.
The network based on the AS is depicted in FIG. 1, in which PIx, PIy, PIz and PIr are protocol processing interfaces corresponding to different traffic. The PIx corresponds to ATM traffic, the PIy corresponds to SDH/SONET traffic, the PIz corresponds to Gigabit Ethernet (GE) traffic, and the PIr corresponds to Fast Ethernet (FE) traffic, wherein x, y, z and r are all positive integers smaller than 128. The SDH/SONET, ATM, GE and FE network connect to the AS fabric through the corresponding PIs, respectively, to conduct switching operations.